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Your Incompetent Boss Is Making You Unhappy
HnT writes A new working paper shows strong support for what many have always suspected: your boss's technical competence is the single strongest predictor of workers' well-being, way ahead of other factors such as education, earnings, job tenure and public vs. private sector. On top of other studies which have already demonstrated that happy workers are more productive workers (e.g. this 2012 paper.), it does make you wonder how long organizations can afford to continue promoting incompetent bosses in today's very dynamic and competitive business world.
NO SHIT. We needed a paper to tell us what we already knew? Damn, why didn't I write that paper... Here goes.
"INCOMPETENT BOSSES ARE THE LEADING CAUSE OF CAPSLOCK RAGE ON THE INTERNET"
Sherlock.
This needed studying?
Bitten Apples are still better than dirty Windows...
What a novel idea! News for Reds, Stating the Obvious.
how long organizations can afford to continue promoting incompetent bosses ....
Depends on how many idiot son-in-laws you have working there.
Have gnu, will travel.
I'm a government worker. I have 8 bosses (actually probably more, but who cares). None of them manage me at all.
They think they don't need engineering / IT managers that are competent because the people managing aren't IT guys (management degrees, MBAs, whatever).
It's fucking depressing coming to work every day.
I was hired by my boss to do his job when he fails to do it himself. Essentially, he drops balls and I have to be there to catch them mid-flight unexpectedly.
Actually, I like my boss as he's extremely knowledgeable and intelligent. But dammit, he can't multitask his way out of a paper bag. When he attempt, everything is left to half-ass completion!
The solution (assuming you're already in a state with incompetent managers) is to allow incompetent managers to be demoted back into a position they're competent in. Unfortunately, society has a huge bias against workplace demotion.
Managers rise to the level of their incompetence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
He was a VP in charge of a large software development organization for a Fortune Five company subsidiary.
After a reorg, and this guy came in, he called the staff to his (large, well-appointed) office, and told us to note that he did not have a computer on his desk.
He mentioned that he was a lawyer, and disliked computers.
That was my 'résumé moment' at that company.
Needless to say, that subsidiary has long since gone the way of the dodo.
Many people don't want to manage other people. It's a tough job, often thankless, and in the words of a co-worker who quit being a boss and went back to technical work, it's like managing a bunch of four-year-olds who can't get along.
If you want good bosses, step up to the plate and make the sacrifice and do the job. Also, be a good employee, good employees can attract good bosses.
Also, in a random digression, I don't think a good technical boss necessarily HAS to be good technically. S/he just has to be able to listen effectively to the people who ARE good technically--which is something s/he should be doing even if s/he IS good technically. A boss who doesn't listen is in my opinion worse than a boss who is ignorant, knows it, and respects the experts s/he supervises.
--PeterM
who has amazing leadership qualities? What then Mr. Article?
Fire is hot, water is wet!
at least it's not a link to slashdot beta.
My incompetent boss made me VERY unhappy back when I was self-employed.
My boss does not need to know any technical stuff. He need to love me, respect me, trust me and cover my ass when I fuck up
Why are you letting your incompetent boss make you unhappy. Why are you giving him or her that much control over your emotions.
And what are we supposed to do with these incompetents if we can't promote them out to management?
We can't very well grind them up into hamburger and feed them to the poor.
There aren't enough circuses left anymore where we can rely on escaped lions to keep the manager population in check.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I manage a group of engineers; I've spent about half of my career being an IC engineer and half managing engineers, and it's been intertwined -- in this company, I started off as an IC, then became a manager, moved to another group as an IC, then became a manager. When my boss proposed to me that I manage the group I manage today, I declined because I didn't think I was technically competent enough -- I'd never actually built the huge, scalable, systems they built, and I knew they could run laps around me.
Eventually, he persuaded me to take the position, with my team's consent. On my first day with my team I sat down with each person in the team and literally my first question to each of them was "What's my job around here?" And they told me they didn't need or want someone to review or approve their technical decisions -- when they had doubt, they talked with each other. They wanted someone to help them understand our customers a little better, and that's why they wanted me.
Generally speaking, I figure my job is to act as a retention aid (my presence around should make my engineers want to stick around more than if I wasn't around) and doing whatever the hell my team needs done that engineers don't want to do. I have technical opinions, sure, and sometimes I even disagree with my engineers. And they do whatever they think is the right thing to do. I think about 80% of the time we disagree, they're right.
I'm good at some things; I'm bad at others. I wonder if the issue is not whether or not a manager is technically competent, but whether or not a manager is competent in the area in which that manager actually spends their time, and their team expects them to spend their time.
The biggest problem with most orgs in my opinion is lack of bottom-up feedback. As long as a boss kisses up to the right superiors and same-level managers, they can be dickheads to their subordinates or get away with glaring gaps.
There should be more feedback from subordinates in their evaluations. Often managers have one two bad habits that if not kept in check, will run out of control. I have bad habits also that would get worse if not kept in check by my boss and colleagues, such as silly things I can get fastidious about or being too frank at the wrong time.
I'm not saying subordinate feedback should be given the same weight as superior evaluations, only that it play a role.
And non-technical managers can still do a decent job in my opinion if they are good listeners and seek a variety of opinions. A good manager can manage just about anything. All else being equal, a boss with a tech background is better, but if they suck in other areas, I'll take a balanced non-tech boss instead.
Table-ized A.I.
You seem to have missed the point. I don't think it's a mystery that the competence of your boss contributes to your workplace happiness. The important thing relevant to this study, however, is that the competence of your boss is the single strongest predictor of workers' well-being, way ahead of other factors such as education, earnings, job tenure and public vs. private sector.
That's not a "duh", and it's a valuable piece of data that companies can use to try to retain valuable employees, a direction in which they can invest resources to avoid costly turnover and the constant expense of training new employees and/or avoid loss of productivity due to miserable employees.
It is not the technical competence of the boss that is the determining factor, it is the competence at managing technical people. Technical competence of their own can help this, though it doesn't always, But it's not mandatory. I have one boss (out of three) who can reliably turn a computer on and off without printed notes (with pictures), and he has very little idea what I do. But they're good people managers. They recognize that they know basically nothing of what I do, and leave me alone to do it. They know what they want - network up and running, computers not overly slow, various new toys their friends have, and they know how to tell whether or not they're getting it. Everything else they leave to me, and when I tell them "that's not going to work" or "it's going to cost this much, and you don't want to spend that much," they trust my judgment because they know I know more about my job than they do. I've been on the same job for over 20 years, and still look forward to going to work every morning.
Managing people is a specific skillset, and not an easy one to master. And it's an important one, that computer geeks wrongly dismiss in much the same way that MBAs wrongly dismiss technical skillsets. It's a popular mistake that managers have to (pretend to) be able to do every job in their department, because MBAs are taught that. But it just isn't true.
.
I was recently "managed" by a CIO who told me outright that he does not understand technology.
Working for him was like participating in a slow motion train wreck. People were leaving the department left and right. I knew the whole situation would not end up in a happy place. And it didn't.
Have a culture of rotating people in and out of management to "lower" positions. Like department heads at universities, the job lasts a year or two then you're back as a normal faculty.
I rotated in and out of a money management job, now I'm back doing technical stuff. As a result I have a very good understanding of that end of the business as well as the techical end.
--PM
If they have good leadership skills, they'll get out of your way and provide cover. In which case you better have someone with serious technical chops to lead the group in a technical manner.
A perfectly competent boss does not need to have strong technical competence to be a great boss. At the most basic level, he or she is there to make sure that you have everything you need to do your job and that you are steering in the right direction as far as the organizational goals are concerned. It's pretty hard for a boss to demonstrate strong technical competence without getting awfully close to micromanagement.
Fuck up - move up, and having the curse of competence. If you're good at what you do then there is no motivation for those in charge of promotions to change your situation, they just keep taking credit for your hard work. Where as if you fuck up it's much easier to promote and move than to discipline or negatively move a person. So when you're seen as giving promotions it seems as if you are recognizing success and rewarding people but in reality it's just making way for a person that can add to the stolen work credit.
This kind of thing seems to happen a lot in big companies. People that are deemed "talented" in technical jobs are "promoted" into management jobs. Other managers see this as some sort of reward for being so good at what you do. Often the technical person has risen as far as they can in terms of salary and responsibility and the only place left to go is management.
That's the conundrum. Do you stay in your current position, effectively dead-ending yourself career wise, or do you make the leap into management for greater potential riches?
The problem, as I see it, is that very few companies offer a track to senior management by sticking to the technical path. Inevitably, someone will try and steer you towards project management or some other management job. Google is a notable exception to this.
Many technical people are just not well suited to management jobs. Too many meetings, too much posturing, too many political games...too many whatever. Putting people like this in management jobs helps nobody - especially the technical person that is Ill suited for management.
So what to do?
I think that salary ranges are part of the problem. It guarantees that eventually a person will "top out" salary wise at a given job. At that point you can either go the management route or, more likely, go to a competitor that offers more money. Your hand is kind of being forced. Instead, why not continue to give this employee raises? If they have hung around long enough to get to the top pay scale and they are good at what they do then why force them to have to make that choice?
I have been a technical manager and I can say without hesitation that one great developer is worth more than 10 average ones. If I have a great developer on my team I'm going to pay them really well. If he ends up making more than me then so be it. In the end, I will look good because this rock star will carry the team. It's a win-win.
And it will continue as long as the rest of us continue promoting 'incompetent' politicians. It really is no different. We act the same on every level, in every organization. It's just our nature... Maybe we'll come around, but first we need to recognize the world isn't driven by human intellect. Primitive emotions and instinct trump all of that. Hence the apparent chaos.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
A worker is more satisfied when they think they boss is competent.
How do they know their boss is competent? Well, the feel satisfied, so reckon they must be.
GG science.
Apart from the obviously correct outcome;
I've found that what matters most about a job is who I work under. I can't properly work under idiots. The person above me - getting on with them, not having to put on a front with them, having them understand or have done my job themselves - is the most important aspect of my selecting a job. And, sorry, but I select jobs as much as they choose whether they want me.
If you want me to work for you, you have to have done - or could do in a pinch - my job. It's a simple rule.
My favourite time was working under a boss who was technically literate if not complete expert (but good enough to spot the difference between technical mumbo-jumbo and actual technical solutions) who answered to only one person - who was also technically literate if not expert. Between the two of them, they rebuilt an entire school network after a disappointing experience with some contracted-out IT. They were literally there pushing the Windows CD's into the servers and bringing up the AD themselves from scratch.
Though their effort was far from perfect, it did the job, and THEY UNDERSTOOD that it was only ever a stopgap. And, in fact, hired me to clean it up. That was brilliant. I was there for several years. When the boss's boss left to retire (and his retirement gift was a Mini-ITX PC loaded up with DosBOX and Linux and his favourite games!), my boss still kept the place good to work for.
After a while, he was forcibly removed from his job (he nearly had a heart attack from work stress, and quit to work elsewhere encouraging me to follow suit) because his boss did not appreciate or understand what he did for a living. From that point on, I was managed by someone with no clue about what I did for a living. I delivered all the promises I'd made, and got the hell out of there.
I took a six-month hiatus of taking only temporary work for places I liked (including taking a "demotion" and working for someone who was in the same job role as I was previously - it was fabulous, I think we both loved it, we're still friends on Facebook etc.) because I was promised a job.
My boss had spoken to his friend, who worked in the same position at a place nearer to my home, to contact me after they got into IT trouble. I was available but it wasn't the "right time" for the other place (they needed to get rid of someone first!), yet I was hired on the basis of starting the next April. Promises were delivered upon, and I was more than happy to hold out for the right job rather than be dumped into a job under someone who doesn't understand what I do for a living.
My new boss knows what I do for a living, understands it, works with it, can't be duped by my waffling, and knows what's reasonable and what's not. In a pinch, he could do my job. The new job is great. His own boss may not know much about IT, but it doesn't matter - his boss could do his job in a pinch. It works. It makes for a perfect work environment.
I still talk to my old boss regularly. I still keep in contact with the temporary boss I had in between. And my new boss and I have a laugh almost every day. Everyone else? Pah. Who cares?
Work for someone who could do your job. Maybe not forever. Maybe to the same depth of skill. But understands what you do because they've been there or know enough.
NO SHIT!
You tolerated an unhealthy, unsustainable, abusive environment (lack of sleep, overwork) for yourself, and forced your subordinates to accept the same.
There is absolutely no need for this in our post-scarcity society in the west. It is pure sadism and power-trip asshattery.
You simply sound like the abusive dick boss and lackey to the .001% that most bosses are. (including the military bosses who primarily defend the interests of the oligarchy.)
There is probably one good reason, if your company promoted a dumb ass, as your boss.
The reason is the oldest in the world. Politics, politics and politics.
But then again, Darwin's law always wins, no matter what the game rules are.
So when the market gets tough on companies to deliver significant results, the trades, networking and comradery will make room for effectiveness and performance.
Perhaps not in the short run, but certainly in the long run.
Since the fix would have to start at the C-Level. And these duds will certainly not fire themselves.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's also difficult to work under a boss who is not only smarter than you, but also smarter than those above them too. Brilliant people have no trouble understanding the technical aspects in addition to the managerial aspects. What they do have issues with is setting the right expectations for their subordinates, and letting go of their perfectionism in light of realistic expectations of average human capabilities. My current boss will go far in his career, but my secret hope is that he might get promoted out from under his current boss and I'll be shifted to someone else who is perhaps less brilliant.... but also easier to work with as a result.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
I've frequently had bosses that wrote cringeworthy notes, the latest being a reminder to turn the clocks back for...
"Daylight Saving's Time."
Ugh. No "saving" some people.
"The only legitimate use of a computer is to play games." - Eugene Jarvis
Look at the following phrase at the end of TFS: "...it does make you wonder how long organizations can afford to continue promoting incompetent bosses in today's very dynamic and competitive business world."
Any editor with a nicely-sharpened red pencil would cross that right out. The first thing that pops into my head was "As opposed to some world in the past that was neither competitive nor dynamic?" When exactly was this, 'cause I don't know when it was. Being hide-bound and slow has never exactly been a recipe for business success, even if other factors meant you didn't go bankrupt right away.
Never had a boss who didn't deserve a beating.
Not even me.
He said "bitched" - belittling, also misogynistic.
And lack of sleep is a killer. The "Tough guy" macho assholes who demean people's concern's by labeling them as bitching are no question, full stop, a huge part of the problem.
Would you go to a doctor who dismissed your complaints as "bitching'? A dentist? Any other professional?
Bosses are not professional. That is the problem. They are basically glorified bullies, and you are acting as an enabler.
I think his attitude came across very clearly, again like just about every boss I've ever had or met.
Sorry, but the
"Junior" more belittling and power tripping.
Sure, I'm the abusive one, while you and Lyons keep using language to minimize and dehumanize the workers.
You know, the ones actually doing shit and carrying the load.
Fucking oligarch apologists.
My experience has been that the biggest factor in how my boss affects my happiness is the boss's people skills. After that, there's resource management, and technical competance probably comes about third. Let's look at these individually:
People skills: Obviously, somebody who doesn't manage people well shouldn't be a boss. This sometimes gets overlooked during promotion, when they promote someone who is technically smart (or else just a good politician) but who lacks people skills. It's always a disaster. A primary part of being a good boss is making people feel respected and valued. Many technical geniuses simply don't think that way.
Resource management: This has to do with boring stuff like schedules, budgets, equipment, etc. Aside from being treated badly personally, few things can make technical people unhappier than having an unrealistic schedule and not being given what they need to do the job.
Technical skills: It can be very bad to have a technical boss who doesn't understand technical stuff. In my experience, the best bosses have been people who were good - but not necessarily great - at the technical stuff. If they're completely incompetent, that's a red flag for the Dilbert Principle. Conversely, someone who is a technical genius is probably happier doing what they're best at: being a technical genius. The very worst case is someone who isn't very good and knows that (as everybody else does), and is insecure about it. That's real trouble. I once left a job precisely because of one such boss.
With those categories covered, everything else is round-off error.
In my experience, it's OK if my boss isn't technical if:
"it does make you wonder how long organizations can afford to continue promoting incompetent bosses in today's very dynamic and competitive business world."
Indefinitely? As long as all organizations are doing it, there's no competitive disadvantage to it. And as long as the job market remains one in which the overall supply of workers exceeds the demand (no change of that in sight), employees will continue to put up with unhappiness, incompetent bosses, etc (at least up to the point where the incompetent boss fires them for threatening their own employment ... no, I'm not bitter, why do you ask?)
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
We're in a self service employment era. Managers only care about their task that effects their bottom line (i.e. personal agenda) and if they drink the company kool aid--the company's philosophy.
Otherwise, we have no managers nowadays. It's either clocking in via computer or workflow tool and you're filling out your own development goals and performance appraisal. Bonuses are share price dependent, raises are based on the board or gov't and promotions are networked via social network skills. I laugh at these management can be important articles.
If you think it is unpleasant to have an incompetent boss at work, spare a thought for all the soldiers in WW1 whose bosses thought massive frontal assaults were the way to win.
....with a link to this paper to my boss thanking and congratulating her. Made her day.
I am not disputing that that is the best correlated variable, but in my experience it is not the lack of technical competence per se which causes problems with bad bosses but instead the concomitant pathologists exhibited by low-skill bosses to compensate for their own incompetence.
I have a story which illustrates the point: Earlier in my career I worked for a state government. One day I get to work and the lead programmer is having something of a breakdown in front of the project manager and they both happen to be standing in front of the entrance to my cubicle. So all I could do was wait there and listen. Turns out that the lead programmer had been devoting all of her time, and struggling for months, to find any way to digest and print the document files previously used in the old oracle/COBOL/dumb terminal system in our new custom client software running on OS X and which was replacing the dumb terminals. So I stand there and listen to the irate complaints from the lead programmer about how the problem was impossible to solve. At the end of the conversation I ask if she would like me to take a look at it. I was done by about 2:00pm the same day. It was easy. I just asked the DB programmer in the cubicle next to me for a sample of a document file. Looks like gibberish so I figure it's not PostScript and therefore must by PCL. Download and install the free GhostPCL renderer, an offshoot of the GhostScript project. Built and installed it. Wrapped the command-line GhostScript in Cocoa's NSTask. Threw together a GUI in interface builder. Wrote a little glue code in Objective-C to invoke Cocoa native classes for loading and displaying the output of GhostPCL and to invoke my NSTask GhostPCL wrapper. And checked the GhostPCL license, which I think might have been GPL, but since I was running it as a separate process and not modifying the source, or redistributing it outside of or organization, we were not compelled to share our custom OS X client source.
Worked great. Everyone was happy. Except the lead programmer, who was livid and from then on set about trying to make my life hell. She banned the project manager from speaking to me. She excluded me from meetings.
The fundamental problem was that the lead programmer did not know how to code. That is not a criticism of her programming skill, I mean she really did not know how to code. As in, literally, could not have programmed a single line to save her life. (Although I can not think of an actual circumstance where anyone would have to do that.) She did not understand what a pointer is. Did not now how to check code out of the repository. Would not have done any good if she had because she did not know how to build code. (In XCode. You click the build button.) Being technically incompetent, she was completely preoccupied with compensating for her own lack of skill, and it was that, not the lack of skill itself, which caused the problems.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Thank you for verifying. These macho assholes driving everybody into an early grave need to be fragged - military and civilian.
and it feels even more true today. Thanks for the repost, I had forgotten about it.
Just WOW!
>I am pretty sure this is how we will (if ever) get a good government, too. The government has to be "us" not "them" yet almost none of us are willing to let it be "me."
How about representation by lottery? Every eligible adult (I guess I mean everyone except those currently serving a prison sentence) is entered into a lottery. The winners go serve in state or federal legislatures as representatives.
They are beholden to NO ONE to get "elected", so don't show up corrupted. And they're far more representative a sample of the population. You'd get homeless people, teachers, blue collar workers, not just the rich privileged bastards we have now. Decriminalizing marijuana would already be accomplished nationwide under this scheme.
My one fear is that the state/federal bureaucracy would end up all-powerful, because the legislators would be unskilled enough to push back vs. the bureaucracy.
--PM
the consequences follow.
I'm rather more concerned with his/her managerial competence, provided that they are decent enough technically.
"people are promoted to their highest level of incompetence." -mr. carroll in other news babies feel pain and the sky is blue. why does it always take a study to show what anyone whos head is not inserted in their anus knows already? since birth.
It is what it is.
"it does make you wonder how long organizations can afford to continue promoting incompetent bosses in today's very dynamic and competitive business world."
As with Potemkin villages "all the way down", many organizations today are effectively "governed" by Potemkin mayors all the way up. Their success is largely due to momentum, market lethargy, and "luck" stemming from the overall skillset of their workforce.
Scott
"Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid."
Your Incompetent Boss Is Making You Unhappy
No he isn't. Who started this stupid trend of headlines that think they know you?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
The basic problem with incompeten bosses is that they try to force you to implement things that won't work. When you try and explain it to them why it won't work they think you are being difficult. And when you implement it and it doesn't work they think you are stupid. And even when they don't interfere with what you are doing they can't tell the difference between your ability and your peers. Best thing to do is git the hell out because it won't end well.
See, managers don't manage things, they manage people. And as long as you can manage your people you will lead your business to success. It says so right there in every MBA book ever written.
With one exception, the best managers I had over a 30+ year career knew nothing about programming. What they knew about was shielding developers from unrealistic expectations, pushing back on the user community's unreasonable and inconsistent demands, ensuring that budgets were adequate for the projects, arranging support from other departments (such as shipping/receiving and purchasing), and listening to what their technical staff were telling them about proposals and in-the-pipe projects.
The one exception was good at those things, too; they just happened to also have over 20 years of programming experience from running their own consulting business.
The worst bosses I had were the ones who'd take the arbitrary "requirements" dictated by the user communities and tell the developers they "had" to meet those impossible schedules, who failed to make resources and budget available to do the work necessary, who overscheduled critical resources such as designers and senior developers, and who insisted on meetings between the users and even the most junior of technicians to "get on the same page."
The one common thread of every bad manager I ever had? They were MBA majors. Not as a secondary add-on degree, but as their primary degree.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Beautiful people tend to be rated more attractive in photographs, and rich people tend to have more money.
What is the definition of "competence" for a boss, again? Part of it must be, surely, "keeping the underlings reasonably happy".
Maybe unhappy people are just more likely to perceive their bosses as incompetent at something or other. Because obviously the problem isn't them.
My company has a j-shaped earning curve. Everyone scrapes by until they make "Director" level then it's millions in compensation. And when they reach that level they spend most of their time spitting on their employees just for shits and giggles. So fuck them, fuck their husbands wives and kids. Fuck them all kill them all.
As a network architect who has had several different managers on my way "up" I have simplified my outlook on this topic: in most cases managers of technical people should stay as far away from the technical side as they can and learn to trust their subject matter experts (if that's what they truly are). The problems begin when non-technical managers start making important decisions based on what "they feel" is important or based on "their" technical understanding of something without involving the actual SMEs. I have had countless experiences with these. I have seen $15,000 switches being purchased for locations that have 3 or 4 users on a 10mbps connection and no on-site servers. I have seen 500mbps MPLS circuits bought for locations that never exceed 30mbps. I have seen $20,000 fiber contracts put into place to simply get wireless where a site to site VPN would even had been more than enough or even a single repeater. Literally thousands upon thousands of dollars out the window on stupid "i must be smart, they made me manager" decisions. Then when it comes to something really important and critical then they want to start being cheap. The hardest part is being in meetings where they start talking amongst each other like they know what they're talking about. According to those who are paid more than me and judge my performance:
Spanning tree BPDU guard can stop malware
Switch access lists can be used for DLP because they can detect encrypted credit card numbers
CRC errors on a link don't matter because ethernet can repeat itself
I'd go on but I need a drink...
When I worked in tech support I hated the idea of performance reviews, because they were written by my manager, who didn't have the technical chops to know who's doing what. Support is like lifeguarding: a lifeguard who is doing a lot of dramatic rescues is not doing his job. A lifeguard who sits in the chair for the entire shift, occasionally blowing his whistle, is doing it right, preventing the big problems. If I were a tech support manager, when the time came for performance reviews, I would say I'm not competent to do that, I'm going to the experts. Then I'd ask every team member to write a short review of every other team member, and analyze that.
Wondered about that.
Seriously, I had one boss that earned the nickname "Special Ed".
He could turn on his PC and check email--and that was pretty much the limit of his technical prowess. So, upper management put him in charge of IT. He didn't know the difference between a DBA and network engineer. Worse--HE DIDN'T CARE if there was a difference. He would basically RANDOMLY assign tasks to people without regard to their skillset or even whether they had tools or access.
EVER SEE AN APPLICATION PROGRAMMER TRYING TO BREAK INTO A WIRING CLOSET?
YEAH, it happened.
So the report confirms an earlier study that "Happy Workers are More Productive" yet every day on /. I read how the evil corporations always exploit the workers, believe they are interchangeable cogs, wah, wah, wah oh boo hoo. And yet as a hiring manager I know that in fact, happy employees come from NOT fucking them over. Will this stop the propaganda? Nope.
And now, we learn that employees don't respect stupid bosses who don't know how to do their jobs. Imagine that! It's shocking!
As an ex-developer turned boss I can state several some facts here based on actual life experience (As opposed to ivory tower study):
The best developer makes a horrible boss. I know, I sucked at being a boss when I first got there because I was the hot shot developer
One can code. Or one can manage. But one cannot code and manage. It's fantasy. Even if you do get a fancy title like "Architect"
Developers mistakenly believe that management is easy, and their jobs are hard. Nothing could be further from the truth. Management is damn hard too.
The "Project Manager" role is one of the most stupid things organizations ever came up with. With the possible exception of flat organizational charts and matrix organizational structures.
Despite the thousands of books being written about management, most people suck at it until they have been at it for years. Funny thing, most junior programmers aren't as great as they think they are either, it takes years to develop good craft. So before you rant about your clueless boss, look in the mirror...
YMMV
Murphy was an optimist
Upper-class individuals behave more unethically than lower-class individuals.
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1118373109
Casteism
When studying a certain subject, pretending that you'll have to teach the material you're studying helps you pay more attention.
Casteism
One of the best bosses I ever had was technically clueless. He had been the company's best salesman. When he wanted to travel less, the president made him our fledgling team's director. He viewed his new job's duty as 'selling the team to management'. He figured out what management wanted for him to look good and shared that with us. His attitude was 'make me look good and I'll make you look good'. He also understood his cluelessness and asked about what to read. He would take books like Steve McConnell's Rapid Development, photocopy chapters and read them one by one while he ran on his treadmill in the evenings. It was always fun noting his progress based on his behavior and questions. Seriously one of the best bosses ever and taken way too young by Lou Gehrig's.